Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [117]
Here, the president’s strategists made a fundamental miscalculation. Getting the case past the presidential election, it turned out, was precisely the factor that allowed all the pieces to click together, paving the way for another sex scandal that made Paula Jones’s allegations blush in comparison.
THE elves were now busy cranking out briefs and draft pleadings for Davis and Cammarata, without a fee. They had formed (in essence) a miniature law firm, staffed by invisible partners whose names never appeared on a formal document and whose purpose was to help expose and bring down Bill Clinton.
In the normal world of civil litigation, driven by economic assessments—how much a case is worth and how much time it can justify—high-powered lawyers do not ordinarily draft letter-perfect briefs, on demand, without submitting a bill. Yet in the high-stakes world of presidential power and politics, there was no dearth of volunteers to suit up for the job. The Paula Jones case ordinarily would have been settled, at best, for “nuisance value.” With President Bill Clinton injected into the equation as a defendant, however, the Jones case took on a special gleam, like valuable treasure. If played right, this case could return the Republicans to power in the White House. It lured to the treasure hunt some of the finest conservative legal talent in America.
Gil Davis was perfectly aware that the elves might have a “political agenda” in providing assistance. This did not render their work “objectionable” in his mind. Davis preferred to think of it as similar to a “third party writing a check to make a financial contribution to Paula’s cause.” The fact that elves were writing briefs to which he was signing his name was no different than “if you’re a Supreme Court justice and you have a law clerk and the law clerk does work for you and gives you some drafts, but it’s your work, so you read it carefully and you correct it.”
Joe Cammarata had no trouble sleeping at night when it came to using the elves’ work. “What do I care?” he asked later with a chuckle. “I mean, you know, a guy wants to send you a brief? Okay. I don’t care if he’s got [an angle].” Even if the person “doesn’t like the president, just as long as it’s accurate, it’s helpful, you know, fine.”
The files in the basement of the Virginia lawyers’ office disclose a regular, active interchange between Jones’s attorneys and elves Jerome Marcus and George Conway. The draft briefs and pleadings supplied by these two lawyers were first-rate and sophisticated—the sort of 14-karat legal work that a small two-man office like Davis’s could never have cranked out on its own.
The elves also played a role as conduits of information. Davis and Cammarata began picking up all sorts of information about Bill Clinton and “other women,” which they viewed as Clinton’s Achilles’ heel. Tucked away in their files was a report about Clinton’s “coming on” to the lead baton twirler for the University of Arkansas football squad. One tip that Davis scribbled down from a Las Vegas caller on a radio talk show suggested that a woman “who had been a student of Bill Clinton’s perhaps in law school, had been a girlfriend of his and had gotten pregnant by him and thereafter committed suicide.” Davis filed these notes away under the heading “Similar Conduct.”
Another internal memo indicated that Joe Cammarata had received a tip from a Ph.D. in Nevada who “claims to know a number of people w/photos of Clinton & [Susan] McDougal on the hood of car having sex.” It added a parenthetical “Them, not the car!” There was also a note in the files, from a journalist source in Arkansas, that indicated: “Will be receiving list of 14 or 17 children who